The Dingle Food Festival www.dinglefood.com. is this coming weekend, friday thru sunday, 03 -05/10. I have been asked to be one of the Judges for the Health and Well Being Food section for the Blas na hEireann National Food Awards. These awards are given to Irish commercial food producers. Thanks to Kieran Murphy of Murphy’s ice Cream for giving me this special opportunity. www.icecreamireland.com On Saturday at 3:00 I will be having a Book Signing at the Dingle Book Shop on Green St. followed by a cookery demo at 5:00 at James Church on Main St. Join me, it’s going to be a great weekend!
October 1, 2008
Seed Savers and Transition Town
I had a great time doing a cookery demo at the Seed Savers Apple Harvest Day last Sunday. www.seedsavers.ie It was another glorious sunny day and the gardens and orchards were sparkling! This is their annual event and it was their biggest crowd to date. I collected the veggies, herbs and apples on friday and headed home to whip up some more all Clare vegetarian dishes (see post on Harvest Banquet). Using only the produce Peter gave me and organic ingredients from the Grainery I made Apple Currant Tart, Apple Crisp, Stuffed Rainbow Chard,and honey mustard viniagrette for the salad I would make on sunday. At the demo, I cooked the potato quinoa cakes from Coming Home To Cook and made applesauce. which I served with Seed Savers honey. I will post the recipes for all these under recipes. The fun part of this was creating delicious dishes using all Clare produce and products. I made a poster that listed all of the varieties I used in each dish so folks could buy the plants and seeds from Seed Savers. For example, I used Keswick codling apples and Mrs. Perry apples for the applesauce and a combination of Ballyvaughan seedlings and Crimson Bramley apples for the tart and crisp. Everyone enthusiastically sampled everything and there was lots of questions about vegetarian cooking and local produce. Mary from Ennis read in the paper that I would be there and came with her copy of Coming Home To Cook that she bought at the Ennis Book Shop for me to sign. So sweet, thanks Mary. Following up on this, I was one of the presenters at the 1st Ennis Transition Town Forum on Monday night. Their first meeting was “Feeding Ennis”. There were many presenters there from the Clare farmers markets, Linnane’s Ice Cream, Seed Savers, St. Tola’s Cheese and many more. I made a soup from, once again, all Clare vegetables and gave out samples, talked about the demos I’m doing, the book and creating recipes using local, seasonal vegetables. There was a great turnout and lively discussions on how to shop locally, bringing Ireland back to growing it’s own vegetables, being less dependent on foreign imports and thus, oil. Community gardens, supporting the farmers and producers, setting up Transition Towns in other communities in Clare were all relevant topics.